I Parked On My Tent. I Did It On Purpose.

 After the my rendezvous with the Mississippi River, the highway climbed out of the valley and onto the flat spread of land that Minnesotans call home. I was only going to skirt the very bottom of the state, just north of Iowa until I reached South Dakota.

One convenient thing about the big flat emptiness of the state was that I could do a pretty good job of scoping a town before I exited. No need to guess about how far I’d have to drive to get to a gas station or a McDonalds where I could buy a soda and spend the next two hours using the wireless internet.

And I actually found the landscape to be pretty cool. I liked the vast scale of the fields and sky. From the highway I could see hundreds of them like sentinels in the fields. There was a tension, I thought, about how they were all together, and yet all stayed as far apart from one another as possible, avoiding each other, doing their own thing. They were like awkward coworkers at the company cocktail party.

The turbines reminded me of a joke I’d heard from a Minnesotan friend:

Q. Why is Minnesota windy?

A. Because Iowa sucks and Wisconsin blows.

The most important landmark of Minnesota, if not America, is of course the Jolly Green Giant. This formidable acrylic icon lies in the town of Blue Earth, which would be an excellent name for dreadlocked, new-age commune. And what could be more hippy than a dude who wears leaves for clothing and promotes a vegetarian diet?

I made it just after sundown—barely enough time to snap the iconic portrait of myself with the nutritious mutant.

Just think, I had started the day with Beefaroo Lady, essentially Green Giant’s opposite. Even though they were at diametrically opposed ends of the dietary spectrum, I wondered if they might have had a chance with each other. Could they have gone frolicking together through some magical world of oversized food advertisements?

No. There is no such place and the two of them are nothing more than dumb conglomerations of plastic.

Fortunately, I had already called ahead at a KOA campgrounds in Jackson about 50 miles east of South Dakota. After a long day of driving, I’d have shower, WiFi (yes, the campground offered WiFi ) and a place to sleep that was not my passenger seat.

Over the last hour of driving, the sky turned a deep crimson and the windmills started blinking red, spread out over the miles of fields like sinister fireflies. More creepily, the hundreds of them blinked in unison, as though driven by a singular will.

The campground in Jackson was right off the highway, giving me a good view of the slow pulse over the fields. There were perhaps two other people on the site, snug in their trailers with the football game on satellite.

The wind gusted over the plains in hard gusts. The tarp that I was using as a tent was going to need some reinforcement. Unfortunately, there was only one tree that I could rope it off to.

Ever resourceful, I tied one end off to a water pump and then moved a picnic table over one side of the tarp in order to hold it down. Since there were no windbreaks available, I made one by moving my car to the opposite side, deliberately driving over the plastic in order to secure the end. After some adjustment, I had a fairly workable tent. The fact that the thing was completely ghetto and jury-rigged only appealed to my aesthetic sensibilities.

Compare to what I used in Ohio:

As fun as it was setting up the tarp, I’m afraid that right now I’m not in a position to give it my full endorsement as a viable tent alternative.

The structure that I used did stop most of the wind, which was the most important thing that night. I’d read that when it comes down to it, a good sleeping bag is more important than a good tent when it comes to keeping warm. True, if your tent leaks in a downpour, a warm down sleeping bag will become useless fast. A waterproof bivvy sack would stand up to these elements nicely though.

I got the idea to use the tarp from an account of some photographer who used it while exploring Yellowstone in winter. Chances are that he had a warmer bag than me and had better idea of how to improvise a shelter.

While my setup worked reasonably well for that night and in Ohio, the concept is probably more applicable in wooded areas where the winds are not so fierce and it is easier to incorporate structures like tree branches to lend stability. Having tent stakes and poles is also probably useful if you don’t want to have to park your car over your tent to prevent it from blowing away. 

When I awoke that morning, the wind was still gusting and it was numbingly cold. I had brought a small stove to cook oatmeal, but found that either my lighter was out of gas or my hands were to stiff to work it. I decided to pack up and find a good restaurant along the highway. I found Chit Chats.

When I sat down, I had an appetite as big as the land. I ordered up a delicious, all-American heart attack consisting of six slabs of French toast and a spiraling galaxy of hash browns. The waitress brought a tray of syrups that were as big as milk jugs. I washed the breakfast down with towering mug of hot chocolate—topped with whipped cream of course.

1615 Miles

Welcome to South Dakota. Every other mile, there was a billboard up advertising some great American icon. There were at least 50 miles of advertisements for the Corn Palace in the city of Mitchell and maybe 150 miles of billboards for Wall Drug out in Rapid City.

At first the land was pretty much like Minnesota, but then the road took a steep decline, descending to the level of the Missouri River. Cottonwoods grew up along the shore. On the other side, the highway climbed into desiccated hills, brown and alien. Like the land in Minnesota, the far side of the river was open, but at the same time it seemed much older and definitely more western. 

Big Boats on A Big River

The Midwest Passage, Cont'd

If you are plotting a cross-country journey of epic proportions, the kind where you find yourself, the meaning of life and/or America, please make note that in October you run the risk of fundraising season for Public Radio.

“For the same price that you pay for a cup of coffee, YOU can bring quality programs to Wisconsin.”

 “Minnesota needs your support. Have you considered sending us $50? Some of you could probably give $100—or if you have $200 lying around somewhere…”

It never stops with those damn broadcasters: the classical music, the thoroughly investigated feature pieces, the whorish demand for listeners’ money. The unfairness.

I had my own music too, though I’d rationed it. I’ve found that a few boring hours of driving in silence makes me appreciate playing the tunes that much more. In a masochistic exercise of self-discipline, I had kept the music off all the way through Pennsylvania. By Indiana, I entertained myself by trying to sing with Robert Plant’s highs; driving Illinois, I aimed for Johnny Cash’s lows.

When I came back to the radio, I decided that if those lefties were going to spend the whole day bitching about how poor they were, I’d get back at them by listening to the right wing. I ended up spending about 45-minutes learning how to choose the right Catholic College for my kids. Any school that puts on the Vagina Monologues or teaches literature by gay people is right out. The kid might as well major in bible burning and witchcraft.

As I absorbed these words of wisdom, I noticed a dark object resting in the middle of my lane. It was a waist-high package of fertilizer. By the time I realized this I was already in a 70-mile an hour swerve over the rumble strip and into the breakdown lane.

It was good to have avoided the collision, but there was still plenty of reason to be vigilant. The roadside was a tour-de-gore, the graveyard for a hundred Bambi’s, their corpses interspersed with the odd skunk or woodchuck mashed into the asphalt. The de-animated animals were as regular as mile-markers. The radio people explained that mating season was making the deer more reckless. Consequently, they were getting massacred like horny teenagers in a horror flick.

2,350 Miles: The Mississippi River.

I got out at the visitor center at the Minnesota side. There was a cold wind blowing, stirring up waves on the river. I walked down the bank so that I could dip my hand in. The rocks were coated with mussels. It’s tempting to say that they were zebra mussels, but I didn’t see stripes, so they were likely another species.

Back inside the center, I found this rather amusing graffito in the bathroom:

The river looked to be at least two miles wide, impressive when you consider that it was still about a thousand miles from its terminus in New Orleans. And it’s impressive, if sobering, to consider that even this natural force has been fundamentally altered by human engineering and made to serve the purposes of commerce. I’d say the river has been tamed, but when you consider its habit of rising up and killing people on the flood plain, that could be an overstatement.

Nearby, there was an enormous lock for regulating the river’s flow, for raising and lowering the enormous barges that travel between the ports. I spent about fifteen minutes watching boatmen guide a barge through.

It was an incredibly delicate operation, like threading a needle if your thread were the size of a football field. There were in fact, two of these football-field sized barges for the one tugboat to push. They had to go through one at a time. The vessels were conglomerations of enormous plastic crates, lashed together by rope. They had all the elegance of a herd of dumpsters.

From behind the fence, I got to ask the boatmen a couple of questions as they worked. There were maybe a dozen of them, in charge of the whole operation from St. Paul to St. Louis. At that point, another tug would deliver the goods to New Orleans. The boatmen would head back north for another trip. Soon however, the river would freeze up and commerce would halt.

The containers were filled with grain and coke: your Wheaties on the move, along with raw material to make the spoon you eat it with.

The barges were 105 feet wide, while the lock itself was 110 feet wide. A five-foot margin of error. The tug couldn’t fit inside the lock at the same time, requiring the boatmen to use the flow of water to move the freight.

I asked one of the guys if the barge ever hit collided with the rails. “It doesn’t hit often, but when it does, it’ll tear hell out of the sides,” he said.

After the lock was closed, it relied on gravity to go down, routing water through pipes to the other side. The water outside the lock boiled furiously as it emptied. After water inside the lock was equal with the south side, the doors swung open and the barge made its slow progress out. When it was finally out of the gate, the workers tied the thing off to pier, and started working the second segment through.

Given the fences and no-trespassing signs, I was surprised that nobody objected to my picture-taking. I asked if one of the workers would mind being in a photo.

“Go ahead, he was on the Discovery Channel last week.”

A fine experience, to be sure, even if it will never live up to his appearance in Tom’s On The Move.